Larrimah
On the back of their Walkley Award winning podcast Lost in Larrimah, Kylie Stevenson and Caroline Graham’s book Larrimah was released in September 2021 by Allen & Unwin. Building on their coverage of the town, the book is not just an investigation into a missing man and his dog. It’s also the tale of a disappearing town and a disappearing way of life.
Larrimah has been shortlisted several awards, including:
* 2022 Indie Book Awards, Non-Fiction category
* 2022 Ned Kelly Awards, Best True Crime category
* 2022 Davitt Awards, Non-Fiction Crime Book and Debut Crime Book categories
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Synopsis
"Maybe it’s stupid to write a love letter to someone else’s town. Especially when the town looks like Larrimah: hot, barren, a speck of dust in the centre of the nothingness of outback Australia. Where you might find a snake in the bar and a spider or ten in the toaster, and if you stopped at the pub for a beer there’d only be 11 locals to chat to—and even then you’d only meet half of them. The rest don’t go there anymore, because of the feud. A town where there’s nothing to see, and nothing to buy and the closest thing to an attraction is a weird Pink Panther in a gyrocopter whose head falls off, intermittently.
It’s doubly-stupid to write a love letter to a town that’s cursed—poison land, the Aboriginals call it, they won’t live there. People go missing there, they say.
And it’s especially stupid to write a love letter to a town where someone did go missing and one of the remaining residents might be a murderer. A town at the centre of one of the biggest mysteries outback Australia has ever seen—a weird, swirling whodunnit about camel pies and wild donkeys and drug deals and sinkholes; a case that’s had police scratching their heads for more than a year, while journalists and filmmakers and Hollywood turn up, from time to time, to ask what the hell happened here.
And most especially, it makes no sense to fall for a place when the town is crumbling into the dust and it looks a lot like your love letter might end up being a eulogy.
But whatever happened in Larrimah, it’s strange and precious and surprisingly funny. And we want to know how it all happened—what happened to Paddy Moriarty and his dog, how they disappeared, how they might take the whole town with them.”